CSI Lost Innocence
by Thor2000
Summary: CSI is spread thin over several cases: a child dumped at a bus stop, a body found in a trunk, a body in a warehouse and Nick thinks there's a costumed crimefighter in the city
1. Chapter 1

Nick Robey was a Chicago native. He had moved to Las Vegas to take care of his mother. His partner was Chad Wilson from Henderson. The two of them had become fast friends in a short amount of time. Chad invited Nick to barbecues at his house, and Nick took care of Chad's house when he was out of town. Their joined duties were in patrolling the looking for JDLR's or things that "just didn't look right." Sometimes it was an ornery gambler who had imbibed too much liquor or a tourist was caught trying to hustle the casinos. The night was dark, somewhat cloudy without a star to light the night sky. It was also a bit cold out with a wind coming down off the mountains. Nick didn't miss the hard Chicago winters, but he did miss the friends he made back there. Chad did the driving up the Strip, and Nick kept a look out for JDLR's around them. Turning off the Strip and out of the realm of the tourists, Chad drove past the sites that reminded him that people lived in this town… a market, a Laundromat, a drugstore, a bus bench with a box next to it….

"Let's turn round the Laundromat again." Nick looked to Chad with a yawn.

"You see something?"

"A box at the bus stop…" Nick was watching the light. It did not look good for a patrol car to go through a light. "God knows what was in it."

"Probably empty…." Chad sighed a bit as he turned round through the back alley behind the Golden Nugget. "So, you still seeing that redhead in Chicago…" He dispensed in small talk.

"Micki?" Nick looked round as they came back out down from the Laundromat. He looked up to the box up ahead at the bus stop. "Yeah… she's going to come down on a search for antiques. She's never been to Vegas before."

"Can't wait to meet her…." Chad slowed closer to the bus stop. There was light over him casting long shadows over the road and a camera overhead. Nick waited for Chad to come to a complete stop and stepped out the passenger side of the vehicle. He came out on one end of the bench and maneuvered around the end of it wondering what had been abandoned off the curb. He started wondering what it was. Please don't let it be body parts he started thinking. That had happened to him in Chicago. If it was guns or drugs, all he had to do was turn it over to dispatch. Turning off the vehicle, Chad emerged from the patrol car to inspect the abandoned package.

"Careful, Nick…" Chad braced a hand on his revolver. "It could be a snake."

"If it is, it's yours!" Nick looked to him then bumped the box with his foot. It was weighted by something in it. It was the box for an old Panasonic color eighteen-inch screen TV. Almost two feet wide and two feet high, Nick reached down and pulled an overlapping flap open; the other flaps popping open with it. Nick first thought he was looking at a large doll, but as he looked closer, he realized its eyes were closed and it looked much more real than he was comfortable with at the moment. Sitting deep in the box was the form of a tiny five-year-old girl with long brown curly hair covering her head.

"Dispatch…" Nick reacted with offended disgust into his radio as Chad peered into the box. "We have a body. Repeat, a body dumped on Emerson a block off the Strip in front of Brinks Laundromat…"

"Oh god…" Chad was a father of two girls himself. It stirred deep hostility in him to see the ugly side of humanity doing this to defenseless young children. He looked deep into the box and was ashamed by what he saw. A tiny brunette moppet of pure innocence, crammed into a box without any clothing on this the coldest night yet for November. Her body was white and still. He reached to pull a box flap out of the way to get a better a look of her and when he did, he got a reaction. Maybe it was a gust of cold air, or the warmth of his body, but the tragic brunette pixie opened her eyes slowly and slightly looked up to him.

"Nick, ambulance! She's still alive!!!" Ignoring procedure, Chad started quickly pulling off his jacket to wrap around her tiny frail body. He pressed it into the box and started pulling it around her to get her warm. He was possibly destroying evidence, but he was not letting this waif die when he could save her. Nick was screaming details and circumstances into his radio. Another patrol car in the vicinity was racing to the scene. A few scant moments behind it was an ambulance with a huge African-American paramedic and a tall athletic and attractive EMT. By time they arrived, Chad was holding the nearly frozen juvenile in the back seat of his patrol car and Nick had the area secured with police tape.

"You find a girl dumped at the curb in a box and you taint the scene by pulling her out of it?" Captain Jim Brass's breath formed in the cold night air as he confronted Wilson. The once quiet neighborhood was busy with patrol cars, an ambulance and a narrow stream of cars passing through the other lane. Blue and red and white lights flashed over the area.

"I wasn't thinking, sir…" Chad looked to the girl getting attention in the back of the ambulance. "I just… I just started life-saving procedures."

"You wasn't thinking?" Brass turned to Robey. "And what were you doing?"

"Securing the area, sir…" Nick looked to him. "I sent a call to dispatch for the ambulance and the footage for the camera checked…."

"Footage was sent straight to CSI…" Gil Grissom, the head of the Las Vegas CSI division spoke up at that moment. Tall and bearded with obvious stoic overtones, he looked to his people on the site. Dark of hair and dashing enough to be an actor, Nick Stokes was photographing the box and deciding how to handle it. It was a package for a very old make and model of TV; tracing its owner was going to be difficult. A few feet from him, attractive and doe-eyed Sara Sidle was trying to talk to the young girl.

"Hi…" Sara beamed toward her. "Can you tell me your name?"

The girl didn't react. She was wrapped up heavy on the stretcher. All she did was blink and look around. All this fuss… She'd never seen so many people before….

"We haven't got a reaction from her since we got here." EMT Louise Foster answered.

"Her body temp was three degrees below normal when we got here." Paramedic Roger Perry added. "No way to tell how long she's been out here…" Sara could only look at the tiny young lady and palm her hair out of her face. Her little cargo was extremely adorable with wide brown eyes, long curly hair and a lean face shaped by her chin. Nick was perusing the area around the area looking for something to photograph besides the on-lookers in the Laundromat parking lot. The box was placed in the CSI vehicle to take to the lab to be processed for prints other than the two cops on patrol. A father himself, Brass, however, had to realize he might have broken procedure to try and save the girl's life. Grissom was speaking on his cell phone with his left index in his left ear blocking out the ambient noise from the street. Getting the gist of another case in the area, he switched off his phone and turned to his people.

"Sara…" He called to her. "Stick with the ambulance and try to get what you can… Nick, you're with me."

"Another case?" Nick watched as Grissom pulled his case out of their vehicle and gestured him to come along. A police car would watch their vehicle till their return, but right now, down the street and up the block at the light was another job for them. It was a good jaunt for them to cover, and they were both in good shape. From what Grissom understood, two perps had held up a gas station nine miles down the line, but instead of trying to find out who they were, they were going to their assistance. The two hoods had raced from the scene of their crime in a dark blue SUV with lightning streaks painted on it, and the exact same vehicle had been found flipped over at the intersection. Nick saw it as soon as he turned the corner. Flipped over and resting on its top with four wheels sticking straight up, he jogged the final two hundred feet to the scene carrying his gear. Grissom looked to him with interested curiosity. From criminal to victim in one night….

"What is this?" Grissom asked first. Police were guiding the traffic around the scene. Lieutenant Jack Coleman was on the scene as rescue squad workers used jacks to lift the vehicle and get to the idiots pinned underneath out to arrest them.

"We don't know…" Coleman looked to Grissom and tried to talk over the sounds of traffic going by them. "We were heading to the robbery scene when we came upon them, but we have no idea how they ended up like this…"

"I'm going to kill that blonde!!!" Aching, groaning and hostile, Horace Trainer was pulled out from under the flipped vehicle ready to be cuffed. "There ought to be a law against standing in the street!!!"

"You swerved to miss a pedestrian and did this?" Nick mugged in disbelief at the damage.

"What pedestrian?" Trainer was bleeding from his lip as he was handcuffed. "Super-bimbo dropped down out of no where and flipped us over!!! I wanted to run her down!"

"Mr. Trainer…" Grissom smirked a bit as the gusts of cars heading by rushed over him. "Are you using or under any substances right now?"

"I told you. Horse…" The accomplice, Joey Brenner, was pulled out next and arrested. He was a skinny gaunt figure quick for holdups; his taller, more brawny buddy did the driving. "They'd never believe us! We were flipped over by a chick in a red cape!!!"

"Was there a big "S" across her chest?" Nick was kidding. Grissom eyed him with slight annoyance.

"Yeah!!!!" Brenner sneered while clutching his side as two officers rode with him in the ambulance. Coleman was guiding the arrest and expecting the CSIs to come up with the extra evidence to pin them to the gas station. Nick was more intrigued by the damage to the vehicle. It was the passing lane of the southbound side of Sands and Burbank close to the Desert Inn. Constant cars were breezing through the well-lit intersection as officers directed traffic. A few more minutes and the wrecker would be on the scene for the crashed vehicle. Nick started snapping photos on a new roll of film.

"What do you think, Nick?" Grissom grimaced and pondered over the crushed SUV.

"Only thing I can figure out is that they bounced off something." Nick was walking the perimeter of the vehicle as he panned over it with his flashlight. "You'd think that if they hit another vehicle that it'd still be on the site, but…" The stoplight over his head flashed to red, Nick stopped talking as he wandered in front of the ten-ton wreck of crushed steel and shattered glass. He had seen something, but what? He flashed his light back to the crushed in grill.

"Grissom…" He called over his superior and got ready to take a picture. Grissom looked up first, saw the look in Nick's face and ambled over to what he had found. He looked round once, and then noticed it. Warped into the front of the hood was the odd-shaped imprint of something that had hit the vehicle at a hundred and ten miles an hour…

It was shaped like a human hand.


	2. Chapter 2

2

"Okay, we almost got you…" Warrick Brown was in the parking garage of the Sahara Hotel. A motorist driving too fast had smashed into the elevator, imbedding his car in the elevator and shutting down that elevator for quite a while. The young lady in it was not quite too happy about it either. If the vehicle had fully entered, she'd been crushed, but instead, she'd been pinned under it and surrounded by creaking metal in an elevator that was threatening to collapse around her. The vehicle pulled out from around her, Warrick Brown extended his hand to pull her to safety.

"There you go…"

"Thanks…" The distraught petite beauty shook a bit on one leg as a paramedic tried to balance her to his ambulance. Warrick could only sigh tiredly and look over to David Philips, the assistant coroner. With the vehicle out of the elevator shaft, he now had a much better chance to check the driver inside it. Plastic gloves on to keep from contaminating the body, he checked first for signs of distress, clues the driver had died under more than suspicious circumstances. No bullet wounds, no blood on the person…

"Could be natural causes…" David guessed his first opinion. "No petechial hemorrhages... No blood except for one came from the crash… Could be a heartattack..."

"Well, let's get him to the lab…" Warrick shined the wrecked car's interior for anything that stood out. The vehicle seemed immaculate. The steering wheel and dashboard slid backward from the compact nature of the crash with the elevator shaft. He frowned a bit as he checked the scene, then gestured the tow truck to take the vehicle without the body back to processing at the lab. His cell rang on his belt.

"Warrick…" He answered it as he perused the shattered and glistening windshield fragments in the floorboard.

"Warrick," It was Grissom. "Are you done there, yet? There's been a shooting at a liquor store robbery on Decatur. I need you on it."

"Am I alone on it?" Warrick stood up straight.

"Katherine's in court." Grissom was still overseeing the processing of the box in which the young girl had been found. "Greg's on his way in. Sara's on a case. I'll get Nick for you."

"Busy night…"

"They're the worst kind…" Grissom responded. David Hodges was still processing the cardboard box, but he was still thinking of the girl that had been in it. What kind of person discarded an innocent young girl like trash? Still, she had been dumped at a bus stop as if someone wanted her to be found. That alone suggested someone cared enough to want her to be found, but there were so many other ways to get help for a minor. Sara would get to the bottom of it. In the emergency ward at the hospital, she was joined by Detective Greg Matthews handling the case, and Dr. Dennis Winslet tending to the care and health of the unnamed girl before him. The precious girl sat up in her bed unaware of the attention directed to her.

"Hi, honey," Sara shined on the brunette moppet now wearing a hospital gown. "Do you want to talk to me now?"

The young girl didn't talk. She stared and studied Sarah with a look of confusion.

"Maybe she's deaf…" Dr. Winslet wondered. "Do you know sign language?"

"No…" Sara reached to her pocket for a candy bar she had purchased from a hospital vending machine. "Would you like a candy bar?" She showed it to the young lady. The unnamed girl took it carefully and looked it over before holding it up to her ear and shaking it.

"No, honey, you eat it…" Sara tried to unwrap it for her. Dr. Winslet, Detective Matthews and a nurse watched as the young girl looked confusingly toward them, unsure what to do.

"Now that's just sad…" Matthews spoke up. "What little girl doesn't know what a candy bar is?"

"One who's never had one." Sara realized. "Any ideas yet who she is?" She looked to Matthews. The girl took a partial bite of the chocolate-covered peanut and caramel and smacked on it trying to decide if she liked it.

"We have no one like her in our missing children files, no one has reported her missing yet. Her prints had no response, and she has not said a thing since we found her." He looked back to her. "I'm thinking we may have to get her picture to the public."

"Wherever she came from…" Dr. Winslet showed his file on the examination of the tragic waif. "Whoever had her did take care of her. She's a bit under-nourished, but she's never been starved. No signs of trauma or abuse, and she's been recently cleaned very well. I still smell shampoo in her hair."

"Probably to make it hard to trace her…" Matthews looked to the doctor and back to Sara. Their tiny Jane Doe had taken a small bite of the candy bar and then laid it to rest on a piece of tissue paper on her bed side table to save for later. She then sat back in her bed and looked to her confused guardians wondering what she was supposed to do. Sarah stared at the partially eaten chocolate bar sitting on the table.

"Why doesn't she just finish the candy bar?" Sara thought about it. "I wonder…. Could someone have conditioned her to do that?"

"The same people who had dumped her?" Matthews voiced. If they were going to find out who this girl was, she needed to identify who left her behind. The only way to do that was to break down the video camera from the bus stop at which she was abandoned to look for the person or vehicle that had left her behind at the curb. That was why they had an AV lab, and the specialist behind it was Archie Johnson.

"Archie…" Sara had returned to CSI and entered the AV lab. "Anything from that traffic cam?"

"Yeah…" Archie looked at her briefly. "I've got it up now… trying to slow this thing down that flipped the SUV. At first, I thought it was a missile or something at first, but…"

"Archie…" Sarah got his attention. "I'm on the abduction case… the girl dumped in the box at the bus stop…"

"Oh, that…" The distracted Asian American stopped tinkering with that video-footage and booted up another one. "I did not get a license plate." He answered back. The footage showed a large dark van pulling up close to the curb at the stop while a vague person revealed himself only by two arms that set the box down by the bus bench. The side doors slide shut again, and the van drove off from the scene. There was no sign of a driver through the tinted windows. Archie had tried scanning the arms for an insignia, but there was nothing there. There was nothing unique about the van. It was late Eighties Ford painted black.

"Security camera shows she was dumped at 11:48…" Archie froze the footage with a tap of a finger.

"That means she'd been out in the cold for…. Thirty-seven minutes." Sara thought it over. "She's so lucky that patrol car decided to turn down that way."

"Yeah…" Archie tried thinking of something else he could do. "How about the box? Anything from it?"

"It's from an old discontinued Panasonic TV." Sara sighed frustratedly. "From the partial dust we lifted off it, it's either been in an attic or closet for several years. There's no way to trace it."

"Just got to get her to start talking." He gave her advice.

"Yeah," Sara made a face that showed she was only partially listening. "I'm going to talk to Grissom. Maybe he can try sign language with her."

"Archie… my man…." Nick was veering his way around Sarah into the room. "What flipped my SUV, dude?"

"I have no idea…" Archie looked from Sara and toward Nick. "I was toying with it before Sara entered, but whatever it is…. It's just out of camera range…." He rebooted his former footage and enlarged it on the big screen. The camera shot was a large angle view of the streets of Sands and Burbank. The cars were in routine with the stopping and proceeding of the lights, but then Trainer and Brenner came speeding toward the intersection at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. With them was a silent blip somehow moving faster than they were; it vanished somewhere below screen and at the edge of the picture, Brenner's SUV seemed to smack into the bottom of the screen and flip backward upon itself. Nick narrowed his eyes and dropped his jaw trying to figure it out. Even Sara was intrigued and it wasn't even her case!

"It's almost as if it knew where the camera view ended…" Nick tried thinking it through….

"Archie…" Sara tried to lend her experience. "Enlarge the impact area…." She gestured over the area where the truck flipped backward. Using his mouse, Archie created a square over that area, the computer program immediately enlarged it, but without any of the clarity or definition as before. It was a largely pixilated image of moving groups of variously colored pixels.

"How much further can you clear it?"

"It's at maximum clarity…" Archie tilted his head to Sara. "And then some…."

"What…" Nick was gesturing over the screen. "Is this ball that slides in and out of view…" Nick was circling with his fore and index finger a shape that just barely slid before the vehicle hit then slid out of the way after the flip.

"I noticed that too…" Archie confessed. "I have no idea what that is, but if you want my opinion, it's the top of someone's…"

"Nick!!!" Grissom stopped outside the AV Lab in the hall and called to Nick. "Liquor store robbery on Decatur, Warrick will meet your there!"

"I'm on it…" Nick paused to look over Archie's shoulder and pat his shoulder. "Continue working on it…" Sara turned and watched as Nick headed out. Archie continued to try running another program to clean up the image even if he had to reboot the entire footage from scratch. Turning past Hodges entering the Trace Lab, he looked up to Katherine coming toward him. She was looking good. Emerald green jacket and skirt with a white blouse, she was just finishing giving her forensic evidence in a murder case.

"You look nice." He told her flatly complimentary. "Body found at 1164 Malcolm Street…." He gave her the case file.

"Grissom…" She scoffed at his timing. "I just got off a murder case. Can't I change clothes first?" She had a look of faint annoyance and stunned disbelief.

"Of course, you can…." Grissom stopped and realized his brash tactic of dispensing assignments. "Greg will meet you there."

"Great…." Katherine gasped and narrowly waved her head on the way to the police locker room for her extra set of clothes. "And you will be…."

"Murder at a warehouse over on Moseby…" Grissom waved his last case. "I'm on my own." He sent back to her his little tilt of the head revealing it was going to be a busy night. His eyebrows piqued and he turned out along his way. Katherine just took her first big breath for the night and hoped she got another one before her shift was over. Elsewhere, it was the break of dawn and businesses were opening and the day was starting. Greg Sanders was enjoying his moment of clarity to quickly stop at the Bank of America to cover the checks he had just used to pay his bills. He parked close to the entrance to hasten his time and jumped on the first open teller window he found.

"Hi…" Greg pulled his paycheck out of his shirt pocket. "I'm here to put this in my checking account." He took a pen to sign the slip and barely looked up as the clerk processed his check. Out the corner of his eye, two figures stormed the bank, their faces covered by masks, their hands brandishing illegal assault rifles.

"This is a hold up! Give us the money!!!" They ordered and a woman's voice screamed and hit the ground. Greg reacted unsure what to do. If they saw his badge on his shirt, they could mistake him for an officer and shoot him, or if he tried to take them down he could still get shot. Hitting the floor himself, covering a mother and daughter, he watched one of the men covering the room and then his partner then grabbing what he could from the teller windows. Just let them enter and exit. Just let them get it over and no one would get hurt. The security guard was shot to his shoulder when he pulled his weapon.

"Just fill the sacks and be quick about it!!!" One of the holdup men raced through the cashier windows grabbing the cash being tossed at him. Looking out the underside of the table, Greg eyed the groaning security guard a few feet from him trying to summon his courage to do something. As he tried to think, someone else made his decision. The entryway exploded open with a spray of broken glass and after that, he heard a muffled scream and the body of someone being tossed across the wall. Coming around the other side of the table, Greg watched someone in red boots racing round the table racing into the stream of bullets fired by the first assailant. Those were unique red boots; they were more like red stockings with soles. Greg noticed a spray of shells hitting the floor next to him. They were bouncing off something hard. It had to be very hard to dent steel-jacketed shells. A moment later, the weapon they were from hit the floor bent in half… another few seconds before its owner was lifted off the floor and hurled into the wall next to his partner. Greg was seeing this all happen from floor level. When it became quiet, he dashed over the security guard shot in the shoulder and grabbed his gun. He whirled round to just barely see a figure vanishing out the entrance. A faint litter of money on the floor, a strafed bank lobby, several terrified bank employees and patrons, a barely seen costumed protector… What the heck had just happened here?

Grissom would hear about it later. On Moseby Street, he arrived at a warehouse he had driven past a hundred times before. Today was the day he finally saw the interior. While the exterior parking lot was filled with patrol cars and even the odd ambulance, the exterior was even busier. He collected his kit, stepped from out of the driver's seat and slammed the car door shut behind as he began assessing the scene. The officers on site recognized him as he entered through the double doors of the former textbook company. At the end of the short hall, he came upon two halls running left and right and the entrance of a large room blocked by uniformed officers and detectives. On the floor was a bloody figure covered in a sheet getting assessed by David Phillips, the assistant corridor.

"Busy morning, huh…" Brass stood at the entrance. "The DB is Jason William Tisdale, forty-two, a computer programmer from USI Industries. When he didn't come home, his wife came here to look for him and found him like this." He looked around the room. It was a large darkened chamber with a rounded roof, the entirety dotted computer diodes speckling the silvery white walls. It looked like night with faint stars illuminating from the darkness. Almost a hundred feet in circumference, the floor was crisscrossed with silver lines. The entrance was like a bank vault with a computer lock accessed through a computer monitor; it's screen darkened as police employees wandered the empty chamber.

"Was there something in here that was stolen?" Grissom looked inside the chamber.

"We have no idea." Brass shuffled a bit irritated when cases deviated from what he was comfortable with. "USI purchased the old warehouse for Tisdale to do research, but they were very obstinate about letting us have access. Whatever this is…" He waved his hand to the room. "Chances are, it killed him."

"Have they said what this is?"

"Again…" Brass shuffled a bit. "They were being a bit closed-mouthed." He looked to Grissom walking the perimeter of the chamber and analyzing its interior. The walls were sheeted in colored aluminum; the diodes imbedded throughout only about a foot apart from the next one in all directions. An etymologist by trade, he didn't know what to make of this electronic monster surrounding him. The diode in the reflective wall intrigued him; it looked like a proximity detector, but it had a lens surrounded by a ring of other smaller lenses. There had to be hundreds if not thousands of these diodes throughout the covering of the room.

"Looks like a bullet wound at close range," David Philips had examined Tisdale's body. "But there's no exit wound. I have to get him back to the lab." He poked his gaze into the room. "Any idea what this is about?"

"Ever watch _Star Trek_?" Grissom asked him.

"The original version."

"I'm thinking _New Generation_…."


	3. Chapter 3

3

The night shift was running into overtime as the sun's rays pierced the sky. Across town off the Strip, Nick arrived at the liquor store the same time as Warrick. On their arrival, they noticed the ambulance carrying a body out of the liquor store. Nick was grabbing his case, and Warrick was hitting the white and red ambulance to get the attention of the paramedics on duties.

"Hey, make sure we get the slugs!" He reminded them.

"What slugs?" The EMT voiced back that night. "He was tossed through the door of the cooler. He has more than a hundred broken glass cuts and scratches over his body!"

"How the heck did that happen?" Nick asked upon hearing that.

"That's your job!"

The ambulance was released as Nick and Warrick exchanged glances. There were two patrol cars on the scene, an officer on duty outside and two detectives inside with another uniformed officer for taking a report of the incident from the overweight black woman who worked the cashier. She was a bit stressed from her experience what with nearly getting shot. Surrounded by boxes of crated and open boxes of beer and liquor, Jim Brass had arrived at the scene after leaving the Moseby warehouse. He turned round to meet them.

"I hope you guys like reruns." He told them.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Warrick made a face. "Wasn't there a shooting?"

"Ehhhhh…" He didn't know how to answer that. "The bullet was fired here…" He stood at the register. "Struck the wall over there." He pointed to the wall behind him. A smoking TV with a shattered picture tube showed the pattern of the bullet. "The perp experienced a recoil that sent him over there!" He pointed to the back coolers where one door had been completely shattered to reveal the void where several dozen bottles of beer once fooled the cooler. Whatever had flung the perp through the door had emptied everything beyond it.

"That's a heck of a deflection." Nick looked at Warrick again and back to Brass. "What'd it bounce off of?"

"This you're going to love!" Jim reached to the wall behind the register and hit REWIND then PLAY on the VCR of the store surveillance system to play off the other TV over the counter. The angle was from directly over the register, giving a view from over the cash register. The African-American clerk had helped one male customer, but the next one had pulled a gun on her. She backed from him scared for her life but had paused long enough to infuriate the waste of human life wanting to snuff out her existence. Warrick watched as the perp held up his gun to shoot and was then erased from the picture. At first, he thought there was a glitch in the tape, but the clerk was still in the picture.

"Where'd he go?" Warrick asked.

"Wait for it…." Brass continued watching. As the scratchy black and white footage continued playing, another figure appeared in the upper left corner to check on the clerk. Across their chest was a large Kryptonian emblem on the chest of a person then departing the scene. Nick dropped his jaw at the sight of it.

"You've got to be kidding!" Warrick responded.

"She's back…." Nick recalled the flipped SUV. If he could link this case to that other one, he realized he would mean a costumed vigilante loose in the city. Elsewhere, another of the city's millions of stories was playing out to unexpected results. Katherine eyed Malcolm Street up and down. She would not have believed she lived near the city built on greed that was Las Vegas. It was a quaint and peaceful suburban neighborhood with several nearly identical clapboard houses. There were a few trees, a yard or two with playing children and the one Norman Rockwell scene of a dad washing his car. She'd been in this neighborhood twice before for other cases. Hearing a noise behind her, she turned to Greg finally pulling up in another Denali to finally join her.

"You were supposed to meet me." She pulled on her sunglasses against the glare of the sun and noticed a few neighbors watching from across the street and over hedges. The number of forensic TV shows on television made her feel like a bit of a celebrity from the attention. They had been called to look at a body, but the officer on charge wasn't sure if it was a murder or not.

"I was at the bank when it got held up…" He had his kit and slammed the door behind him. "A guard got shot but survived, but the perps both got assaulted." He stressed tiredly over his rushed testimony to the police at the scene. "I'll tell you about it later…" Katherine merely acknowledged him and leaned back in forth in her t-shirt and white slacks.

"That's a body all right…" Greg was first to reply. Sitting in the middle of the carport was an open trunk with the skeletal remains of a body inside it, a set of tools nearby on a picnic table. The body was dried and desiccated, its mouth frozen open into a long silent scream. The eyes had dried into tiny slits above a faint bump that had been a nose. Clad in a long white dress, her shriveled arms were folded across her chest; her legs folded up under her, the remains seemed whole. Katherine knelt down to scan the remains.

"She's been dead a long time…"

"The trunk belongs to Sarah Witherspoon, an interior decorator…" Detective Ryan Braddock revealed. "According to her husband, she bought it from a yard sale somewhere, but didn't have a key for it, so he jimmied it open with his tools and found the body inside it. Mrs. Witherspoon was so upset by the sight that paramedics came to sedate her…"

"Just like that old urban legend of the bride in the trunk…" Greg mentioned between snaps from his camera. Katherine looked up at him briefly then back to the body.

"Yeah, I'd bet she'd been in an attic for several years." Katherine looked for telltale signs of homicide from the bony spindly fingers sticking up from the arms of the corpse. "She's partially preserved, almost mummified… the trunk's probably airtight, I'm seeing no evidence of foul play." She lightly checked the victim's fingers. "Her fingers have dried blood on them. I'd say… she's been dead between fifteen to twenty years, give or take…" She stood upright again. "We're going to have to find out where the trunk was bought to identify her. That means taking her to the lab for an autopsy and study of the trunk."

At the hospital in Las Vegas, Sara had returned with Grissom to exploit his ability to do sign language. She was hoping if she could break through to the girl, she could get her back to her real family - whoever that was. Meanwhile, most of Las Vegas was falling in love with the girl found deserted in the box. There was even a hospital fund to choose a name for her. The contending names were Monica, Charlotte and Kellie, but Sarah liked another name - Lainey. It was her nickname for Elaine Caudhill, an old schoolmate who had died in a car accident. The second she saw that girl with the large brown eyes and long curly brown hair, she immediately thought of Lainey.

"Anything new?" Sara found Dr. Winslet.

"Uh, yeah…" Winslet lead her to the children's room. "For one, I don't think she's ever used eating utensils. When we brought her breakfast, she burned her fingers trying to eat with her hands…"

"Why would someone do that to a girl?" Sara's heart was going out to this child more and more.

"Maybe when we get the who, we will get the why." Grissom responded.

"Another thing…" The doctor led the way to the children's room. "I don't think she's been around other kids before. When we moved her into pediatrics, she seemed fascinated by her roommates, but she hasn't exactly taken to them." He pushed open the first door to a room with beds and a wide center area with toys, a shelf of books and a TV. "She's been sitting and reading one book after another from her bed since she left the emergency room."

"What about the TV?" Sara noticed the cartoon running that had the other three children in the room enthralled.

"She's not impressed by it."

"She came from a place without a TV." Grissom noted that fact. As he entered the room full of playing children, he looked round and noticed Lainey in a center bed sitting up in hospital pajamas in her bed read a book in front of her. The plastic fork and spoon saved from her breakfast were tucked in the front pocket of her hospital pajamas; they were something special she had learned and she wanted to keep them. Sara wandered up to her first beaming to her, getting Lainey's attention by stroking her hair back. The girl looked up with youthful innocence, her big brown eyes opened wide. Even Grissom forced a smile to her.

"Hi…" Grissom beamed to the brunette princess doing his sign language as he talked. "My name is Gil. What's your name?" He gestured to the adorable pixie, but she just beamed to his display of gestures and waving hands.

"Can you talk to me?" Grissom tried again. Their tiny Jane Doe just shined at his act. Sarah just continued watching the scene unfold with Dr. Winslet with her. The girl's only response was shaking her dainty left hand to her mouth.

"I don't think sign language is going to help." Grissom finally responded. "This…" He copied the girl's gesture. "…Is the universal gesture for hungry. If she knows any form of sign language, she's possibly been taught a form of sign individual to her."

"Great…" Sara looked at the innocent young waif with the big brown eyes.

"Another thing," Grissom looked at Lainey's book. "In order to read, you need to be able to talk first, and her book is at a seventh grade level…My opinion, she's been advanced schooled." Sara turned and noticed that. "Her inability to talk could be a form of psychosis… she's blocking out what happened to her, and not talking as a result. If that's the case, we may never get any answers from her…. Even if and when she ever feels safe enough to start talking…"

"So," Sara stepped out of the way as Dr. Winslet checked Lainey's pulse and blood temperature. "We have a little girl who's… never been around other kids before, never seen a TV, never eaten with a fork or spoon, never had a candy bar and yet, is capable of reading at a seventh grade level." She paused thinking about it. "She might have been deserted by a cult."

"Sara…" Grissom noticed something else and took the tone of being her boss than her friend and mentor. "You're not getting emotionally connected to her, are you?"

"Grissom, she needs someone." Sara looked back at their tiny ward. "Would you write me a letter of recommendation if I asked for it?"

"Why do you need a letter of recommendation?"

"I can't stand the thought of seeing her in a foster home. She needs someone who understands where she's been to nurture her correctly. " Sara looked back upon the girl. "I want to adopt her."

"Sara…" Grissom took a deep breath as his hand rubbed his beard. "We work ungodly hours, our lives are rarely our own…"

"Katherine does it…."

"Katherine had Lindsey before she joined CSI…" He pointed out. "That's different."

"The only difference is that Katherine had Lindsey…" Sarah pointed out that little fact. "If she can raise a daughter, why can't I?"

"Sara," Grissom tried to reason with her. "You're becoming emotionally-attached to this girl. Once you lose objectivity, it's going to be that much harder to help her."

"Or maybe I can help her better…"

Back at CSI, Archie rarely had that many cases involving him playing with video footage, but Nick and Warrick were leaning on him to bust their possible superhero flying loose in Las Vegas. At normal speed, the footage from Greg's bank showed a rapidly moving figure that had charged one of the criminals and flung him across the floor. He thought he could get a face as the blonde powerhouse in the costume slowed and came around Greg under the table to face off against the other one. The second bank robber had opened up his semi-automatic upon the caped female to a spray of bullets flying from off her chest. With Warrick and Nick watching, Archie zoomed in on the face of the blonde heroine once again and started altering the numerous pixels and image distortion.

"I think I finally got a face here." Archie continued playing with the distorted image. Nick scowled as he waited for it, and Warrick folded his arms before his chest as he shifted his weight tiredly to his other leg. Archie clicked a button moving the frames ahead one by one. This girl was fast, too fast to be human, but they had a computer that could do miracles. His face actively working as he undistorted the blur, he clicked the frame again and again. The large red "S" flared across an ample bosom became more obvious. The girl's golden blonde hair became even more obvious. Archie clicked again.

"Dude…." He gasped.

"You have got to be kidding me!!!" Nick reacted in disbelief.

"That… that's Britney Spears!!!" Warrick saw the pop-star's face starring out to him from the bank footage. Their blonde powerhouse was a dead-ringer for the tabloid pop princess!


	4. Chapter 4

4

Nick and Warrick were standing above Grissom at his desk. He looked at the work they had to offer from the flipped over van at the Sands and Burbank Intersection, the footage stills and evidence from the liquor store, the uncanny yet nearly disturbing image of the pop star in the semi-blurred image from Greg's bank and most recently, a inexplicable bust at a meth house that left seven drug-pushers in the hospital with broken bones and internal injuries. Grissom scowled once looking at the photo, flipped it over to read the enhancement report on it then flipped back to look at the face in the photo. He looked up to Nick and Warrick.

"You know there's an explanation that goes with this." He responded matter-of-factly.

"Of course," Nick was musing excitedly. "A rocket ship from a dying shard of a planet sending a child to Earth to reunite with her cousin already living among us…"

"I'm not quite that far, but…" Warrick was looking more to the evidence. "We checked the timing on the bank video with the girl, and as best as we can estimate, she's moving somewhere between 150 to 200 miles per hour in that footage. Now, there's no way anyone could really be moving that fast so I'm exploring the possibility of a publicity stunt with a dummy tape, a fake robbery, paid witnesses, a phony gun…"

"Good theory, but…" Grissom removed his glasses and arched his eyebrows. "These guys in the hospital are not actors, they have real criminal records, and don't see them as becoming actors in recreations where they're taking serious physical abuse."

"Well," Nick spoke up. "I gave a copy of the photo to Brass and…"

"Brass has already got a response from Mrs. Spears' manager." Jim spoke of himself in third person and turned into the room with a dour little grin behind Warrick. "I got this message from him from New York City." He flashed his fax. "The very busy Mrs. Spears has been very actively working on a new video for her album. There is… no way she can be here in Las Vegas."

"Well," Nick stopped and mused with a big grin. "She is supposed to be faster than a speeding bullet."

"I don't think so." Brass shared in his humor. "Her manager was quite adamant about her not leaving without his knowledge."

"Need anymore proof?" Gil looked to Nick.

"Well," Nick was looking for another direction to take the investigation. "Where do we go next with it?"

"Well," Grissom cleaned his glasses a bit. "Prove to me how she's faking this stuff. Disprove the testimonies of what people claim she's doing. I mean, with enough explosives, anyone can flip over a car."

"Come on," Warrick pulled Nick back to the lab. "Back to the bat-cave, old chum…"

"Why do you have to make me Robin to your Batman?" Nick took offense. Brass looked back at them secretly supporting Nick's idea. He recalled reading comic books. He still often wished there were people with gifts that helped save the world, but other than psychics and mediums giving insights on cold case files, he had grown up and given up hope of any costumed gods saving the world.

"I kind of hope they don't bust it." He confessed.

"Well," Grissom turned solemnly wise again. "Witnesses can only tell us what they think they saw, that's why even parapsychologists don't rely on stories as proof of ghosts, and why we rely on forensic evidence to tell the true story."

"Did you read that article about the Sasquatch DNA discovered in Canada?" Brass recalled it.

"I'm still holding out on the final results." Gil had read that article too. Out in the corridor, Nick and Warrick were discussing their evidence as they started to pass ballistics then realized they hadn't seen the results on the shells recovered from the bank. Their ballistic expert was testing a pistol from a daytime case.

"Guys," Bobby Dawson was still wearing his protective glasses as Warrick and Nick paid him a visit. "I finished the examination of the slugs from the bank." He directed them to look at his work on the ballistic microscope. Nick looked first before Warrick as Bobby provided the voiceover for the warped slugs. "The one on the left was test fired into a flak jacket; it's warped, it's twisted, it has pieces of thread caught in it from the jacket…"

"Yeah…" Warrick was looking now. "They're similar, but not quite…"

"But the one on the right is nearly pristine except for the squashed tip." Bobby pulled off his glasses excited to be studying evidence from what could be the closest thing to a real superhero in the world. "It was slowed down before it deflected which suggests to me it bounced off something it could not penetrate… like rubber contracting to a super dense area that resists being broken before rejecting the projectile."

"Well, this is incredible, Bobby…" Nick looked to Warrick and back. "But… unless you got cell samples from the planet Krypton… This doesn't help us explain just how she's doing it."

"We need more." Warrick was lightly shaking his head. "I mean… she can't really be bulletproof."

Nick was trying to hide a grin liking where this case was going.

"I said…" Warrick reiterated his point. "She can't really be bulletproof."

"Yeah," Nick turned into the hallway as he imagined the pop princess patrolling the sky over Las Vegas and making his job easier. "She can't…." He passed Katherine heading on her way to pathology. She acknowledged Warrick tiredly shaking his head and responded by tiredly shaking her head as well. When she pressed open the door to the lab, Doc Robbins looked open like Merlin in his dark sanctum engaging in human sacrifice. The fresher body was from Grissom's case at the Moseby warehouse, but upon seeing Katherine, he stood up straight and realized she was here for the older body in his possession.

"Caught up yet?" She asked him.

"Pretty much…" Robbins pulled off his rubber gloves for fresher gloves and removed his glasses. He turned to the remains behind him on the other table from the trunk. "Okay…" He had worked hard on this one to preserve it. The body's joints had dried up, it's limbs frail and bitter and the head hunched forward at an angel that it did not touch the examination table. "Obvious female, between nineteen to twenty-five years of age, around five-foot-seven at death, brown hair, brown eyes, no signs of abuse, tox screen revealed nothing, but I did notice this…" He gently twisted its fingertips. "Her fingernails were filled with paper and pulp from the lid of the trunk."

"As if she were trying to claw her way out…" Katherine mentioned the obvious. "Sounding more and more like the urban legend…" She started picturing it. "A bride playing hide-and-seek gets into a trunk, it locks on her and before she realizes it, she's trapped with no way out…" She paused thinking about it. "I'm just not buying it. I still think she was placed in the trunk. Trunks just can't lock shut by themselves." She tilted her head up. "How long would you say she's been dead?"

"Deterioration suggests a ball park figure of around thirty years." Robbins looked up.

"Thanks, doc…." Katherine sighed a bit and stepped backward on her way out of the lab. David lightly brushed against her heading back in, but he gave her a nice hello as he acknowledged her. Palming her hair back, the harried working mother nearly came to a collision with Sara Sidle at the admission counter.

"Hey," They noticed each other. "How's that girl from the box, um, Lainey? Is that what you called her?"

"She's not talking yet… probably, not going to…" Sara thought about the child at the center of her case. "I just… really feel for her. I want to be there for her…."

"I heard a rumor going round that you submitted your name to be her guardian."

"Katherine…" Sara tilted her head up. "Do you think I could be a good mother?" Katherine looked back at her in surprise.

"Uh, um, I…" She was not expecting that response. "Wow, uh, Sara… Do you think you're ready for that kind of responsibility?"

"I want to help this girl."

"I know, but…" Katherine stopped fussing with files and paperwork to turn to her friend and colleague. "This girl is going to need a lot of special attention. She's in shock, we know she hasn't had a real up bringing; she's probably been sheltered somewhere from the world she's just now been thrust into…. Sara, our lives aren't even our own. You'd never be able to give her the full attention she deserves."

"I'd leave CSI if I have to…." Sara got a response she hadn't expected. "I mean, it's not the first time I've considered it, but… Katherine, have you seen this girl yet? She looks at me with these eyes…. She needs someone."

"You're going to do this regardless of what you're told." Katherine looked upon her.

Elsewhere in Vegas, the nightshift had borrowed computer tech expert Chris Pierce from the daytime shift to lend his experience to the nighttime murder at the Moseby warehouse. First, he plugged in his laptop into the system, but when the memory core turned out too large for it to handle, he had to instead resort to other means. He opened the security file in the computer and found a way to boot it up from within the system. When he did, the chamber came to life. Once dark and foreboding, it lit up, every pinpoint of light in the walls and ceiling lighting up and coming to life. Grissom scowled curiously at the site of it and wondered if his hunch was correct. On the scene, Jim Brass jolted a bit as the room lit up and turned to the USI director overseeing the investigation.

"Are you sure there isn't anything you want to tell us?" Brass spoke. "I mean… I'm not sending my men into a room that's going to kill them."

"If I had any thoughts that room killed Tisdale," USI Science Director William Connors spoke up. He was a tall intimidating figure of a man built like a linebacker but wearing a sweater, sports jacket with blue jeans and eyeglasses. "I would have spoke up by now."

"According to our coroner…" Grissom spoke up. "Jason Tisdale was shot at point blank range by a .35 millimeter hollow point… the type used by most small hand guns. The person who shot him would have had to be at close range to shoot him and most likely someone he trusted to be able to get that close."

"I have no idea what I'm looking at here…" Pierce was reading file after file of routines. Some of the files were photos of people and places from television and the movies, numerous images of celebrities were going past him, of cities and places, of dates and times… The programming was advanced. It was meant for turning images from photos and videos into lifelike interactive characters and realities. He clicked one file and had a download routine asking for character, setting and plotline. He skipped that and found a list of simulation scenes.

"Which one should I click?" Pierce wondered.

"Which one was Tisdale running when he died?" Grissom asked.

"I can find out…" Pierce went back into the sub-routine. The last file running was the one on top with the most current date. He clicked that one and the chamber came to life. Multicolored lights started flashing and waves of light material started appearing. Geometric shapes outlined small town structures and floor level streets. Grissom's jaw dropped at what he was seeing. What was once a room was becoming the outside world of a town other than Las Vegas. Even Brass was in awe. Pierce jumped to his feet in surprise. Connors could only sigh with strained annoyance. With the computer-simulated structures came people and events. A red-haired boy raced by carrying a fishing pole. People started appearing and filling the scene of Americana. A small-town sheriff walked past Grissom and waved hello.

"Gentlemen…" Connors strolled forward. "Meet the latest in interactive virtual reality technology…" He explained. "The computer core can scan and assemble any reality from any resource. This particular simulation was based on Tisdale's photos, history and memories of growing up in Mayberry, North Carolina in the Sixties. The core also can recreate simulations of movies, televisions and video games for amusement and exercise. The core so far has created routines adapted from thirty-two TV shows, sixteen popular movies and seven highly popular video games for that truly interactive experience."

"And kill anyone in it." Brass noted the skinny Mayberry deputy sheriff wandering past him.

"On the contrary…" Connors chided him for that thought. He looked to a simulation of a farmer hastening into his truck and starting it up. "My programmers programmed into the core every means a human observer might experience harm from the simulations and the necessary safeguard against it from happening. In short, while the program uses magnetic fields for the subject to handle his surroundings…." Connors jumped into the path of the moving truck as it moved through him. "But not for the simulations to touch the subject. The program is unable to harm the observer."

"But can it be programmed to?" Grissom asked the question.

"Absolutely not!" Connors refused that proposal vehemently then tilted his head toward the domed ceiling of the chamber hidden by a holographic sky. "Computer, run Tisdale's routine for 010908, Connors authorization code 3624."

The routine obliged and the surrounding people and vehicles vanished. The vehicles reappeared in separate spots as the simulation turned back to where the images were the night Tisdale was murdered. Grissom looked to Brass and back again to see a holographic image of Jason Tisdale still alive and coming around the Mayberry Theatre toward the courthouse. Lifelike images of old Mayberry denizens now aged or long gone communed around Grissom and Brass, only those figures were much younger than their real life counterparts. The image of Opie Taylor raced by with his friends. Sheriff Taylor drove by with Deputy Fife in an old Ford Galaxy patrol car and Tisdale shined toward the image of Ellie Walker, a lovely brunette young lady, coming from the drugstore across the street.

"That's Ellie Walker…" Connors recognized her. "I was with him the night he was programming the core with her photos and biographic details. He said he had a childhood infatuation with her."

During the routine, Ellie extended her arm to Tisdale and pointed at him. When she did, there was a puff of smoke from her hand and Tisdale flailed around from a bullet to his head before collapsing in the doorway next to Pierce. Where the boundary of the holographic chamber ended, the holographic image of Tisdale was cut off. Connors jumped back from the sight of the recreated murder. Grissom turned and looked to Brass again.

"No, that's impossible!! Freeze, program!" Connors halted the images in mid-pose. "The holographics are not capable of doing harm!"

"Mr. Connors…" Grissom walked around the image of Ellie Walker in the street pointing her finger at Tisdale. "These recreated images have mass, correct?"

"Yes, but…" Connors was reeling from the creation his company had created. "They're not programmed to harm the observer… they're… commands set in a routine that can't be changed or affected. My clearance can't even affect them."

"Maybe someone figured out how to get around them." Grissom looked at the face of Ellie Walker as she was in the 1960s. He waved his hand through her immaterial figure.

"That's weird…" Brass departed the archway to the real world in the Mayberry empty lot and looked at the figures of pedestrians leaving Foley's Market in the Mayberry recreation. "I can touch everything else." He leaned down to the body of Tisdale partially incomplete as if he was taking a pulse from its arm. Although his image was cut off where the holographic emitters could not reach, his body in the chamber was solid and gradually decreasing in density as it extended out the archway.

"Mr. Connors, is it possible that someone disguised themselves by doing this?" Grissom stepped inside the colored air within the space of the Ellie figure and held his arm up. It was an ill fit. Being taller and bolder, he stood exposed where she couldn't cover him.

"Well, yeah…" Connors thought back. "It's part of the role-playing routine for observers to engage in role-playing games…."

Grissom turned to Brass.

"We're looking for a real person." He realized.


	5. Chapter 5

5

"Did you figure out how my husband died?" Madeline Tisdale asked the officers. Her friends called her Trish; her husband had called her Lynn. The police called her Madeline. She was garbed in a form-fitting black sweater with a long blue skirt and high-heeled pumps. Her hand stroked her long blonde hair back and turned one of her long legs over the other.

"Mrs. Tisdale…" Brass began the interview. "Did your husband talk to you about his work?"

"Of course, he talked about it often." Madeline turned her head up. "If he was excited about his progress, he talked about it, but if he was having problems with it, I couldn't get him to talk at all about it. It's as if…. He was working the problem mentally while I was around."

"It had to be problematic in your marriage…." Grissom mentioned. "Did you feel he placed his work before you?"

"We had a very good marriage." Madeline lightly tilted her head to her left. "We both worked hard, but we both had planned a trip to Florida."

"That would have been expensive on your bank accounts." Brass pulled out subpoenaed bank statements. "From what we have, you could not have afforded much, even with the mortgage on your house."

"We've had some hard times." Madeline tilted her head to the other direction. "We finagled it."

"How much do you owe in the casinos?" Grissom asked. Madeline didn't respond too fast. She leaned backward curiously. Grissom continued. "Friends of your husband said he was trying to cover your debts, but you kept developing more tabs as fast as he paid them off."

Madeline was trying to think of a response.

"Your husband worked for USI…" Brass started revealing the facts. "It's a large government think-tank with several of its own patents, projects and subsidiaries as well as its own businesses, including it's own movie-making division. Their research employees all had contracts that paid royally in case their employees died in the progress of their work." Brass paused. "If he died at work, you'd be paid off very well."

"Yeah…" Madeline started looking guilty. "I think he said something like that." She looked over at the police officer in the room.

"Have you ever accompanied your husband to his work?" Grissom asked.

"No, he never allowed that."

"When we printed his console, we found five sets of prints…" Grissom was leading to his point. "We identified all of them… including yours off your employee card at the Sands."

"He carried that detached console to program it at home several times." Madeline turned her head up again and shifted in her seat. "I sometimes helped him to carry it."

"You also carry a 35-Colt revolver." Brass produced a copy of her permit for her weapon. "Like the weapon that killed your husband."

"Yeah…" Madeline sighed a bit. "He bought it for me to protect myself on the Strip, but I lost it somewhere."

"That's convenient…" Grissom collected their evidence against her and closed her file. "But he was killed by a person who had a basic understanding of his work. That only leaves one person who could have been there when he was murdered." He stood and palmed the case file under his arm to process for the arraignment. Madeline was quickly becoming repentant. She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands; what did she do? It was a very good marriage! If only Jason had not threatened to stop paying off her tabs. Her life was about to get very confused and messy.

Grissom turned out onto the hall past the break room. He made only a few steps and heard the TV on in the break room. The newscaster on the TV was featuring a story about the alleged female superhero in town. Greg was sitting and eating his dinner, a salad, sandwich and bottle of juice. Nick stood a few feet from him sipping a bottle of water as they looked at the TV.

"Supergirl is back…." The newscaster reported. "Earlier today as technicians ascended the neon lights above the Caesar, a gust of wind knocked maintenance man Gene Stirbak off to what might have been his death except he was rescued by a girl who caught him and left him safe on the roof. This is the eighteenth sighting of this alleged superhero in the last three days…"

Grissom just tossed the account out of his head. Rumors out of the general public were that the police was covering up the sightings, but the truth was that the police just didn't care about them. There was just nothing case worthy about a supposed costumed female going around saving people. No one really believed she could fly, flip over cars and repel bullets. She'd probably vanish in another week or two anyway. Grissom reached his office and sat at his desk with the Moseby warehouse file. He sighed tiredly about ready to pull off his glasses to clean them. He felt a shadow entering the room.

"Grissom…" Sara was feeling good about herself as she entered Gil's office. "I was talking to a social worker over Lainey, and she said…"

"Sara…" Gil looked up forlornly from perusing his murder case on Moseby Street. "I'm sorry, but I got a call from the case worker overseeing Lainey's file." He paused unsure how to proceed further. "But she found a better home for Lainey. Kevin Hawes from the governor's office adopted her as a favor for his wife. Apparently, she allowed herself to get emotionally attached to the case and… wanted to make a home for her."

"Oh…" Sara reacted disconnected as if she were trying to shrug off the hurt emotions. "Uh, but… What about my…"

"Sara, I wrote you the letter, but I'm afraid it didn't matter." Grissom hadn't risen from his seat; he just leaned back in his seat trying to be as sympathetic as possible. "They just felt that the Hawes could provide her more the home she needed than a single woman as yourself could."

"But…" Sarah stepped forward, a few tears coming down her face. "I was a foster kid too. I would have understood what she needed. I could have…"

"I know you would have given her all the best attention she needed, but…" Gil continued. "They were more interested in what was best for Lainey."

"Lainey…" Sara was crying much more as her heart broke. "She won't even recall who I was. I was there when she was found. I rode with her into the hospital holding her hand. I was the one who named her that…."

"If it's any solace…" Grissom had stood and come around his desk to lend his support. "They're keeping the name you gave her." Sara held on to him for support as her heart broke upon realizing how close she came to having Lainey in her life. Elsewhere in the building, another supposed adult was crying for other reasons.

"….But that's not the worst I did…" Clark Danvers blubbered over the interrogation table. "After I stole the doughnuts, I tossed them off the overpass and a car slid through them and caused a twelve car pile-up!" He stopped crying and wheezing to wipe his nose. "I know I should have stayed there, but I got scared and didn't want to be arrested. I also put my mom's dog in her car, but it released the brake and the vehicle rolled back through traffic and through the McDonald's living room, out the other side and into the swimming pool….. They wanted to sue!!!" He continued crying to Brass who just stood across from him trying to keep from laughing. Katherine had entered the room to this sight. Danvers was six-foot-two and three hundred and forty-two pounds in size. Crying like a giant baby, he had confessed to eleven acts of mischief and vandalism as a teenager and another thirteen cases of bad lucks and stupid decisions. Brass turned his amused face over to Katherine.

"And all I asked him was his name…" He bit his lip to keep from laughing.

"Mr. Danvers… Mr. Danvers…" Katherine took a seat across from Danvers but next to Brass. "Mr. Danvers, we don't care about any of that…"

"What…" The giant baby stopped wheezing.

"Mr. Danvers, do you recognize this?" She pulled a photo of the closed trunk from her file. "According to Sarah Witherspoon, the woman who had bought it, she reports having purchased it from you at a house at 1327 Old Post Road near Henderson. Do you recall selling it?"

"I didn't steal it…" Danvers once again started fearing the worst. "My mom recently got married and moved to Colorado. She asked me to get rid of all the old stuff in the old house before she sold it, but I decided to sell it in a yard sale instead. I dumped what didn't sell at the landfill."

"Did you look in the old trunk before you sold it?"

"Was I supposed to?" Danvers started getting scared of jail time again. "I didn't have a key, I sold it as is."

"Well," Katherine sighed again. "When it was jimmied open there was a body found inside it." She showed the photo with the photographed remains.

"What?" Danvers saw the photo of the desiccated corpse in the trunk. "Oh my god, I carried that thing on my back!!!!"

"Okay, let's cut to the chase…" Brass did not want a chance to let this guy start blubbering over and describing another history of misdemeanors and stupid decisions. "You are not being arrested. We just want to identify the woman in the trunk. Do you have any idea who the woman was? From what we can tell, she's possibly been in the trunk since the Late Seventies or Early Eighties. Have any idea who she could be?"

Danvers's round face started thinking. His jaw dropped a bit as his mind started working. He sat there for a full minute without a word.

"Would it help if we contacted your mother instead?" Katherine asked.

"Uh," Danvers finally blinked his eyes. "My mom said she had an aunt who vanished from her wedding in 1976." He paused taking a deep breath. "I know because she talked about it a lot. Everyone thought she jilted my Uncle Mike…. He married my Aunt Carol a year after that. Grandpa tried hiring a detective to find her."

"Do you have a name for this aunt?"

"Melissa… Millicent… Melanie… something like that."

"Okay, well, that's a start…" Katherine made a face of confused satisfaction to be getting somewhere on this thirty year old disappearance case. She wasn't sure if it was going to turn into a murder case or not, but at least she saw an end to it. That was something she barely saw in most cases. Danvers had his mother's Colorado phone number in his wallet, and barring possible another conversation with Uncle Mike, Katherine could hopefully put this case to bed. After dismissing the wimpy and unfortunate Clark Danvers as a possible suspect, she found she had to move on to other cases. All she had to do was slip by Grissom without being seen…

"Katherine…" He noticed her.

"So close…" She told herself and stepped back to see her colleague. "Yes?" She responded in good humor.

"The body on Malcolm Street, how's that going?"

"Fairly routine…" She pretended to be distracted by his irradiated pig on the shelf and other specimen jars. "It's thirty years old, we're tracing next of kin, it's turning out like that urban legend with the bride in the trunk, but… that's impossible, right?" She wanted his opinion.

"All legends start out with a basis in truth." He looked up at her with a stoic look and leaned back. "The only reason to have urban legends is to pass on the stories of the past…" Grissom once again turned reflective. "It's not our fault that some tales become so popular that they get repeated throughout history. Stories are stories because they are shared to entertain; each culture or generation adding their own details to the story over time until it barely resembles the original version."

"But Gil…" Katherine started revealing her doubts in this case. "It's identical to the urban legend. It couldn't really happen, right?"

"Katherine," Grissom sighed and looked away briefly before looking back to her. "Why don't you try having this discussion with Greg. He was in the bank when a young lady in costume crashed into it, survived getting shot at point blank range and tossed two men across the room before departing the scene. We know that's impossible, but yet, the security camera confirms what Greg said he saw."

"But that's just far-fetched."

"Have you seen the security tape?"

"Gil," Katherine scoffed at the notion of a costumed young girl whose body deflected bullets and looked just like a certain pop star. "Do you believe that a girl who looks like Britney Spears is patrolling our skies in a Supergirl costume?"

"I'm trying not to."

Over on the Strip, a packed sports car of deluded and stoned teenagers stuffed their shoplifted clothes, shoes and designer jeans to the floor of their vehicle. Their driver eyed the patrol car racing for them then the second one coming to chase them after running the red light. Weaving around traffic, in and out of on-coming cars and the more rational thinking denizens of the city, he looked where he was speeding, pressed his accelerator to the floor and looked in his rear-view again. There was a third police car coming after him this time. If they were caught, it'd be jail time for the stolen clothes and more for the illegal weed in the car. He looked to freedom again and saw something else coming at him… a blonde female presence with long blonde hair and a red cape coming down out of the sky and shooting toward him. He didn't believe it. He didn't want to believe it. A moment later, his vehicle would lurch violently and then flip forward end over front, and he would be dangling from his seatbelt in an upside down car with his idiot friends and stolen merchandise. The shapely caped figure shot from the scene of the crash and rapidly ascended the sky to keep from being seen. Her clenched right hand extended upward to guide her path, her left hand palmed down against her bosom to streamline her flight, her golden blonde hair waved and lashed against her flapping cape. Her long legs were drawn together to reduce the wind resistance as the ley lines of the planet once again pull her to sub-orbital levels. Once the lights of Las Vegas were twinkling beneath her, she danced a pirouette within the heavens, all of creation spread out before her. She had gifts, she had powers, she was a goddess now, she… had classes in the morning. Her brown eyes looked down to earth, narrowing and focusing on the world beneath her. She'd have to return to return to her dorm room soon. Just because she was now immortal did not mean she could avoid sleep, but first, she had to deal with the gunshots she heard. A deep breath caused her breasts to spread wider the symbol on her chest. Her brown eyes pierced the city looking for the degenerates willing to ruin the lives of others along with their own. She dived to Earth ready to make them suffer for their sins…. She was an angel of vengeance, the protective spirit of the city, a defender of the innocent, she was… humanity's last hope.

END


End file.
